Hackathon

Join us on the third SIGGEN hackathon!

On the last day (8th November) of INLG 2018, we will host the third SIGGEN Hackathon which is for the first time a full day event. There will be a pre-event meeting on the evening of 6th November where you meet other participants and form into teams (preferably 3-5 people, although if you want you can go solo) for the main event. This pre-event meeting is only to socialize and get to know each other; no coding! The real action starts only on the hackathon day – remember we have a full day!

At the hackathon you will build a conversational app using flow.ai which is a platform for building chatbots. The platform helps you to deploy your apps on chatting platforms such as Facebook Messenger. Flow.ai has publicly available documentation which you could start ingesting right away, although Flow.ai staff will be available at the hackathon to offer technical help! 

Flow.ai allows you to add external NLG functionality to your apps. At this year’s hackathon you will make your app to converse like a pro on a few topics by exploiting the semantic web resources (e.g. DBPedia). Fortunately the WebNLG challenge (Generating Text from RDF data) has already investigated NLG in the context of DBPedia. You will use the WebNLG data to train an NLG solution for your app. Additional data resources might be made available to supplement WebNLG data.

Finally you could invite your family and friends to your online deployed app. Sit back and relax while your app does the cool talk!